Moderates United

It occurs to me most of us spend all day every day running from or TO anxiety.  That latter surprised me. 

I was sitting at my favorite Mexican place, where I have eaten hundreds of times, and he has hired somebody new, who is not quite as good as the other folks he normally uses.  And I was sitting there, and it wasn’t bothering me.  I was sitting there, remembering all the different conditions I had eaten there, with girlfriends, with my “Lonely Hearts Club”–all of us divorced–with my boss, and the many, many times I had eaten there hungover.

Usually I use food as a drug.  Usually I gorge myself.  And I was watching her move slowly, and I realized I wasn’t feeling anything.  Not in a good way or bad way.  There was neither eagerness nor irritation.  It just was.  Time was just present.  And the food was good like always, but it was nourishment.

And I thought: flow requires a certain amount of stress.  Loving your job requires needing a certain amount of stress.  Athletic highs depend on the anxiety of the possibility of failure.  Climbing to the top of your professional, if it proves rewarding, will often feel good precisely because failure was possible, and the anxiety of contemplating that failure was a driving force.

Because this is how I rolled today, I had lunch at Taco Bell.  I sat opposite a Marine in his dress uniform.  And I was thinking: what drives Marines, more than anything, is fear–fear of failure, fear of letting their comrades down.  Men kill and die from this fear in every war any nation fights.  This fear of not meeting expectations is the essence of their indoctrination in boot camp.  It is followed, reasonably enough, with pride–the carrot–in being the best.

But I am at the rough edge of calm.  Outwardly, it feels textured in a not particularly pleasant way, let us say a pine cone.  But I can feel, or sense, or suspect intellectually, or something, that underneath it is something interesting.  This is where the real water is, the real ocean.

That will do for now.  I’m not sure how to say what I’m saying.

I watched Tracks on Friday night, about Robyn Davidson’s mostly solo trek across western Australia, and Maiden Trip just now, about Laura Dekker’s solo trip around the world in a sailboat.

I think I felt a need to engage with my own loneliness.  It is impossible to be honest with others, or yourself, until you can develop comfort with solitude.

I’ve been reading Pema Chodron today as well.  She says that in the Tibetan tradition the spiritual path begins with hopelessness.  I really like this.  She suggests “Abandon all hope” as a useful motto.  I’m going to put it on my wall.

Here is the thing: we look for comfort in the world, and fear we may not find it.  We look for the good, but fear the bad. We hope for what may be, but fear what may not.

Abandoning that hope clears the space for genuine new growth, for opportunity.

For both of these women early grief clearly played a role in their quests.  I could feel the pain in Dekker about her parents divorce, and Davidson lost her mother to suicide, and her dog to circumstances.

Here is my question: what was the value of these losses?  Is it good that their grief led them to do extraordinary things?  Clearly, both seem to have found some solace, some reconciliation.

What is the value in being broken? Should we all wish to remain pristine? How do we best embrace what wounds us, makes us bleed, rips us into pieces?

These are rambles as I try to sort out my own feelings, my own thoughts, my own Lebensgestaltung.

I am coming to realize that until one accepts impermanence that all new joys are daggers in the heart.  Those of us who feel deeply can feel the end at the beginning. We can feel the death in the life, the loss in the gain.

Ultimately, though, impermanence is a hopeful creed: it says joy is possible and ubiquitous, if we do not ask more of life than it can offer.

I have been trying to make Sunday an actual day of rest lately.  I made an similar effort some years ago, but it didn’t take for some reason.  It’s been working much better this time.  I am ready, I think. 

The logical necessity is making the rest of the week a six day work week.  I work Monday through Friday day job, and Saturday catching up, cleaning, planning, organizing, etc.  Vacuum, laundry, bathrooms, shopping etc.

And I light a candle whenever I get up after sleeping in, and do my best not to worry about anything, not to think about politics, taxes, bills, global hunger, or whatever.

And what is funny or interesting or sad, according to your inclination, is that a worry-free time space feels odd.  So much of the sense of being, of existing, is tied up in thoughts and worries, at least for me, and I suspect I am not alone in this.

It will take time for me to anchor in this sense of sacred time but it seems to me worth the effort.  It is possible to go a lifetime and never really relax.  Why not learn to do it, and practice regularly?  Work harder six days, and not at all one day.  Take a true vacation every week.  Be present for yourself, and your family and friends.

it seems to me the number of Springs in your life–and there may be many of them–depends on the number of winters you have completed.

Summer can perpetuate, but it cannot initiate.

http://www.infowars.com/what-pisses-me-off-about-transgender-bathrooms/

I will add a short commentary: the way principles work, is you care about them all the time.  If you think rape is wrong, then there are not exceptions. If you think hate crimes are wrong, there are not exceptions.  There may be times when pursuing the eradication of something odious requires an interaction with people and behaviors with whom we do not agree.  Economic intercourse with China was supposed to liberalize it.  This might have been a possible outcome, but China spends as much or more suppressing the hundreds of thousands of riots demanding basic rights it sees annually as it does on its military budget.  Very little concrete good has come.  The power elite, the dictators, the oppressors, the imperialists: they are still in control, and still obscenely wealthy, wealth gotten as a result of their parasitic relationship with the people they “rescused” from Capitalistic oppression.  This is not even irony: it is obscenity, and cannot and should not be tolerated through the complicity of elision.

Likewise, companies who care about gay rights should boycott nations like Saudi Arabia which MURDER them, publicly, after a trial, by beheading.

They should boycott Russia, Egypt, and frankly most of the Middle East, and large segments of Africa.  They are in a position to raise consciousness about these and other issues.  As I have said, I think the issue of the rights of Dalit men and women and children in India should be made a front page issue.  It is every bit as awful as what the South Africans did to the blacks in Apartheid.

But these assholes make MONEY in these places.  The hypocrisy is indescribable.  The incapacity for human decency masked by token, irrelevant, and largely HURTFUL gestures like boycotting North Carolina is absolutely revolting.

It occurs to me the first task is stating what should not need to be stated: people lie. They say benign sounding things, push your buttons, because they have figured out how to manipulate people unequal to the task of critical thinking.

Second: sincere intelligent people can believe stupid things because they have an unacknowledged NEED to believe them. Smart people can be and often are delusional.

I read today Zimbabweans–the recipients of the sort of government Bernie Sanders advocates–have been reduced by hunger to feeding on rats and stray animals. Who among the left wants to own this outcome? Who wants to explain to me how the money ran out inVenezuela, where they literally can’t keep the lights on or provide toilet paper?

My root anger, the core reason I persevere in following and caring about politics, is that if people of goodwill and intelligence fall asleep at the wheel, there is no limit to the scoundrels and buffoons eager to lead us into ruin. The suffering this will entail is unnecessary. It iscometely preventable. And yet it remains likely. It remains the presumptive future of nearly all of us.

Stable dependency equals stable power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzwMJAFWLtQ&feature=youtu.be

Here is an interesting statistic: the number of registered sex offenders in the US outnumbers our best guess as to the number of supposed transgenders–roughly 758,000 in the first case, and 700,000 in the second.

Robust social orders are not hard to maintain.  This is why so much effort is being paid to streamlining, homogenizing, trivializing, and ultimately stigmatizing traditional culture.  They retard the full consolidation of power by those seeking it.  They prevent the full power of effective propaganda from reaching the masses undiluted by notions of individual conscience, personal unmediated responsibility, and duty to a Higher Power.

I was reading an interesting interview a couple of months ago with a taxi driver who drove a plugged in former Marine intelligence specialist, who said that all the problems of our 350 million person nation, with its fantastic economic output, and pervasive but still imperfect peace, could be eliminated by shooting some 200 people.  I concur with this, even if I of course do not recommend it.  It remains time for cultural combat, using words, and organization.

These agenda items are driven by small, well funded cabals, and need to be understood not as the onset of new ideas–Bruce Springsteen has not cancelled any concerts in any states which have NOT “protected” the rights of sex offenders to use women’s bathrooms–but rather of carefully orchestrated informational campaigns which depend entirely on the stupidity of the American people, their vulnerability to being triggered by prior propagandistic conditioning, and the near total control of the complicit media which the power elites have developed at great expense and care over the past 50 years.  Nary a dissenting word to be heard.  Nor sought.  And at some point, they want this to be impossible.  They want perfectly targeted social media campaigns which seek to demonize all dissidents, to destroy their lives, ruin their livelihoods, and leave them begging or compliant.  And to back all this up, they want gulags, which will have another name, and be portrayed in a benign light.

America, wake the fuck up.  These people do not mean you any good.  They do not mean humanity any good.  They will death, destruction, evil, rapine, torture, cruelty, and the decline of everything decent.  One has only to look at their tactics, and the instantly triggered and stopped violent rages which they have programmed into their drones.

The capacity for identity and for judgement arise together. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot know who you are unless you know who you are not. You cannot know what to do without a sense of what not to do.

The root benefits of political pluralism and the location of conscience with the individual–which is the root idea of so-called “Individuslism”, and obviously not the selfishness alleged by propagandists–is the creation of many overlapping, nuanced, graded perspectives. In a group evaluation of a topic, participated in by psychologically individuated, mature in-dividuals, truth gets closely approximated.

The opposite is EITHET the tyrant, or submersion in a mass directed by a tyrant or tyrants.

In my view you can and should judge people by the nuance and consideration of their views. The more you here propagandistic memes, the less should you consider them psychologically sovereign, individuated, and worthy of the trust a democratic system implies.

More later. Work to do.